"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."

~ Samuel Ullman

LifeOptions Program

Six Life Arenas & Twenty Factors

The LifeOptions Program covers the following 6 life arenas which are sub-divided into 20 lifestyle and attitudinal factors. The LifeOptions Assessment will provide you with a clear, well-ordered, and scaled overview of how you compare to others in a similar life circumstance regarding your personal growth and preparedness for the life transition we call retirement. Combined with one on one coaching, you will design a plan for the best years of your life.

1. Career & Work: It may seem strange to include a section on Career & Work when we are focusing on retirement. However, work is an integral part of our culture and our lives. Work influences us until the day we die. Even when we are retired, we still perform “work”. It might be formal work, such as a part time job or consulting, or it can be informal, such a charity or volunteer work, or research for the garden club.  Work, whether formal or informal, has a profound influence on us our entire lives. You will develop a better understanding of the role work plays in your retirement.

   Factors:	1. Ideal Work
   	2. Work Benefits
   	3. Work Options

    

2. Health & Wellness focuses on how to keep your body and your mind as healthy and vibrant as possible. You are each in-charge of the care and maintenance of your body and your own mental attitude. This arena examines how you maintain your physical health, how you relate to yourself internally and how you discipline yourself physically and mentally.

Factors:	4. Health Practices
	5. Vitality
	6. Wellness Attitudes

 

3. Finances & Insurance includes what you have already learned about finances in general and also a sense of how to manage your personal finances. Like most of us, you probably learned your fundamental attitudes about money and finance in your very early years and carried this wisdom (or this baggage) for a long time. How well are your attitudes and information about money serving you today? Money plays a significant motivational role in our lives. Money can offer a sense of security when we feel our finances are in order, and a sense of foreboding if we feel they are not.
   

Factors:	7. Knowledge of Finances
	8. Financial Planning
	9. Financial Confidence

 

4. Family & Relationships consists of all your family, personal and casual relationships. Research indicates that relationships play a significant role in your life and your retirement. People who have a strong social and familial network live longer, healthier lives.
   

Factors:	10. Flexibility
	11. Caregiving: Aging Parents
	12. Caregiving: Adult Children
	13. Grandparenting

 

5. Leisure & Social is an ever-broadening and dynamic sphere for those who have graduated to their Bonus Years. All that you like to do when you don’t have to do anything else is contained in this arena. Fun and play, hobbies and sports, relaxation and rest, and so much more, are all parts of the leisure arena. In your retirement years, however you conceive of them now, you will most likely spend much more life energy in your in leisure and social pursuits than you did in your full-time working years. Yet, as attractive as a "life of leisure" may sound at the outset, the vast majority of retirees find that too much focus or imbalance in this area leads to disenchantment. You need to distinguish between a healthy, leisurely lifestyle and a "life of leisure".
   

Factors:	14. Leisure Preferences
	15. Residence
	16. Travel
	17. Hobbies

 

6. Personal Development Arena includes all the active and intentional actions you perform to grow and improve yourself. These can include personal reading, informal and formal education, self-discipline and self-vitality, practicing care, compassion, courage, kindness, patience, wholeness, independence, forbearance, authenticity, and many other civic and personal virtues. At its core, personal development entails becoming all that you can become, expressing your gifts, talents, abilities, etc. as fully as possible. Your need for personal development doesn’t lessen as you approach your retirement transition; in fact, it probably increases. Now rather than focusing on how to keep your edge as a worker, a professional, a craftsman, etc.; retirement’s central focus is more about how to keep your edge as a person. Your need for personal development hasn’t diminished because of retirement, it’s simply changed its primary target.
   

Factors:	18. Life Meaning
	19. Education
	20. Volunteering