Transformation

You have reached the final stage of The IMPACT Model.

During the previous stages, you have developed a much clearer understanding of yourself and your retirement. You have explored how to have Conversations With IMPACT with yourself and others, how to make sense of your situation by finding the MEANING you need, recognised helpful and unhelpful PATTERNS, considered where greater ACCEPTANCE of reality may be needed, and examined the CHALLENGES and resources involved in creating the retirement you want.

All of this provides the foundations for TRANSFORMATION.

Transformation happens when you use what you have learned to make meaningful, lasting changes to yourself and your life. Those changes can happen in any of the areas you have been working on during the course. You may want to develop your identity, role or status, improve your self-esteem or self-worth, make changes to your home and family life, strengthen or develop personal and professional relationships, continue working or pursue new career or professional interests, improve your health and wellbeing, address your finances, change your lifestyle or social life, pursue cultural interests, change something about your environment, or reconsider the relationship between your past, present and future.

Your transformation may therefore involve something significant, such as developing a new identity, changing where or how you live, beginning a new venture or substantially changing a relationship. It could equally involve smaller changes that make an important difference to your everyday retirement. What transformation means will depend upon what you have discovered about yourself and your retirement during the course.

But wanting transformation doesn't guarantee it will happen. How you approach transformation can help or hinder your chances of achieving it. This is why the first part of this stage explores helpful and unhelpful approaches to transformation.

Transformation also needs direction. If you are going to make changes, you need to understand where those changes are intended to take you. This is the purpose of the Destination Finder.

Together, these final two parts address both sides of transformation:

How will I make the journey successfully?

and

Where am I trying to get to?

Wanting something to change doesn't necessarily mean that transformation will follow. The approach you take to transformation can strongly influence whether you succeed.

You can have a clear idea of the retirement you want but undermine your progress through unrealistic expectations, impatience, procrastination, self-criticism, insufficient resources or the wrong strategy. Equally, your approach can support transformation through patience, self-belief, appropriate resources, realistic goals, effective strategies and the right level of challenge. I describe these as unhelpful and helpful approaches to transformation. 

Your approach isn't a single characteristic. It is a combination of how you think, behave, feel and relate, together with the knowledge, skills, resources, support and strategies you bring to what you are trying to achieve.

You may recognise yourself predominantly in one approach or find that you have a mixture of both. You may also have a helpful approach in one part of your retirement and a much less helpful one somewhere else.

This section helps you identify how you are currently approaching your retirement transformation, recognise what is already helping you, and identify what may need to change.

An unhelpful approach can include:

• Impatience and the need for a quick fix
• Unrealistic goals and expectations
• Perfectionism
• Procrastination and avoidance
• Self-sabotage
• Self-criticism
• A lack of, or inadequate, knowledge, information and resources
• A lack of self-belief
• Poor or unsustainable motivation
• Too little or too much challenge
• The right goal but the wrong strategy
• Not enough support or the wrong type of support
• Difficult emotions such as stress, anxiety or depression
• Unhelpful mindsets, such as fear of failure or being overly risk-averse
• The wrong skills and abilities, or the right ones that are poorly developed
• Inflexibility and continuing with an approach that isn't working
• Inconsistency and difficulty sustaining helpful actions

The important point is that difficulties with transformation don't necessarily mean that your desired destination is wrong or beyond you. Your approach may be making the journey more difficult than it needs to be.

A helpful approach can include:

• Acceptance and a commitment to doing what it takes
• Time and patience
• Positivity towards yourself and from others
• Self-belief and trust in your abilities
• Turning setbacks into opportunities
• Useful ideas, sound knowledge and effective resources
• The right skills and abilities, developed through practice and repetition
• Realistic goals aligned with effective strategies
• The right type of support and encouragement
• The right level of challenge
• Positive emotions that help rather than hinder
• A sustainable level of motivation
• A resilient mindset, including learning from adversity and taking sensible risks
• Flexibility and a willingness to adapt your approach
• Consistency and a willingness to keep doing what works

A helpful approach doesn't mean that transformation becomes easy or that everything goes according to plan. It means the way you approach the transformation gives you a better chance of dealing effectively with what the journey requires of you.

The question, therefore, isn't simply: 'What do I want to transform?'

It is also: 'Am I approaching that transformation in a way that gives me the best chance of succeeding?'

First, read Robert's story, then answer the questions on the next slide.

Robert was 65 and had retired from teaching at a secondary school eighteen months earlier. He had enjoyed teaching and had been good at it, but by the time he retired, he was ready to leave. What he hadn't anticipated was how much he would miss the sense of competence that came from doing something he had spent years mastering.

One of the things Robert wanted from retirement was to return to something he had enjoyed when he was younger: restoring classic motorcycles. He liked the idea partly because it had nothing to do with teaching. Motorcycles belonged to an earlier part of his life, before lessons, marking, meetings and responsibility for other people. Returning to them felt like reclaiming something of himself.

His ambition was to buy an old motorcycle, restore it himself and eventually take it to a classic vehicle show.

Robert appeared well equipped for the challenge. He had the money, practical ability and time he needed. He researched possible motorcycles thoroughly before buying one, joined an owners' club and found a local mechanic who was happy to advise him. He was highly motivated and could happily spend several days at a time working in his garage.

But something began to change once the restoration got harder.

Robert expected himself to be as capable as he had been when he restored motorcycles more than thirty years earlier. He could accept that technology had changed and that he needed to relearn some things, but emotionally, being a beginner was much harder. After spending much of his working life knowing what he was doing, he disliked feeling incompetent.

If he struggled with something he believed he should already know, frustration quickly became self-criticism. A difficult afternoon in the garage could become evidence that he had “lost it”. He compared what he could do now with what he remembered being able to do in his thirties, although he was comparing his current struggles with a selective memory of his former competence.

His standards also became increasingly demanding. What had started as an enjoyable retirement project gradually became something he measured himself against. He wanted every part of the restoration to be right and found it hard to leave a job alone if he wasn't completely satisfied. Asking the mechanic for advice was acceptable in principle, but Robert sometimes delayed doing so because he felt he ought to be able to work the problem out himself.

His progress became increasingly erratic. He could spend several enthusiastic days working on the motorcycle, become completely absorbed in what he was doing and feel that retirement was finally giving him something he had been missing. Then something would go wrong. Robert would become frustrated, walk away from the garage and sometimes avoid returning for two weeks.

The motorcycle remained important to him, which made his avoidance even more confusing.

“I've got everything I need to do this,” he told me. “I've got the time, the money, the tools. I even know someone I can ask if I get stuck. That's what annoys me. I should be further along than I am.”

What Robert hadn't yet considered was whether having what he needed to transform something in his retirement was the same as approaching that transformation in a way that helped him succeed.

Using the helpful and unhelpful characteristics of transformation you have just explored, consider Robert's approach.

• Which helpful characteristics can you identify in Robert's approach? What evidence can you find for each one? BOX FOR NOTES

• Which unhelpful characteristics can you identify? Again, what evidence can you find? BOX FOR NOTES

• Robert says he has “everything I need to do this”. To what extent do you agree with him? BOX FOR NOTES

• What appears to happen psychologically when Robert encounters difficulty or makes a mistake? BOX FOR NOTES

• How might Robert's previous experience of being competent and experienced at work be influencing how he approaches being a learner again? BOX FOR NOTES

• What role are his expectations of himself playing in his progress? BOX FOR NOTES

• Why do you think something Robert genuinely wants to do has become something he sometimes avoids? BOX FOR NOTES

• Which parts of Robert's approach would you encourage him to retain, and which would you encourage him to change? BOX FOR NOTES

• Does Robert need a different destination, or a different approach to reaching it? Why? BOX FOR NOTES

As you consider Robert's case, notice that a person can have helpful and unhelpful characteristics operating at the same time. The question isn't simply whether Robert has a good or bad approach, but which parts of his approach are helping his transformation and which are getting in the way.

You have now seen the characteristics of helpful and unhelpful approaches to transformation and considered them in the context of Robert's situation. Next, consider which approach you are currently using.

You may recognise characteristics from both lists. That is entirely possible. This activity isn't meant to place you permanently in one category or the other, but to establish the balance of your current approach and identify what, if anything, needs your attention.

Return to the characteristics of an unhelpful approach to transformation.

Score each characteristic from 0–10 according to how strongly it currently applies to you:

0 = This doesn't describe my approach at all
10 = This describes my approach very strongly

Once you have scored all the characteristics, add your scores together and divide the total by the number of characteristics you scored.

This gives you your Unhelpful Approach Score: ___ /10 

BOX TO ENTER SCORE

Now repeat the activity with the characteristics of a helpful approach to transformation.

This time:

0 = I have very little or none of this characteristic
10 = I have a great deal of this characteristic

Again, add your scores together and divide the total by the number of characteristics you scored.

This gives you your Helpful Approach Score: ___ /10

BOX TO ENTER SCORE

Put your two scores alongside one another:

My Helpful Approach Score: ___ /10    (SCORES PRE-POPULATED)

My Unhelpful Approach Score: ___ /10

Don't look only at which score is higher. Consider how high or low each score is in its own right.

High Helpful / Low Unhelpful

Your current approach is strongly supporting your transformation.

Identify the helpful characteristics contributing most to this and consider how you will maintain and protect them. Also look at any unhelpful characteristics that received higher individual scores. A strong overall approach doesn't mean nothing could undermine it.

High Helpful / High Unhelpful

You have plenty in your approach that can support successful transformation, but you also have characteristics that can work against it.

Your task is twofold: keep using what is already helping you while identifying which unhelpful characteristics need the most attention.

Low Helpful / High Unhelpful

Your current approach may be making transformation much harder.

Rather than trying to change everything at once, identify the one or two unhelpful characteristics having the greatest effect and the helpful characteristics that could provide the strongest alternative.

For example, procrastination may require greater consistency; inflexibility may require greater adaptability; insufficient resources may require acquiring what you need; too much or too little challenge may require returning to your Stretch Zone.

Low Helpful / Low Unhelpful

You may not be actively undermining your transformation, but you also don't currently have enough of the characteristics that support transformation.

Pay particular attention to your lowest Helpful Approach scores. What needs to be developed, strengthened, or introduced for your transformation to progress?

Now look beyond your overall scores and look at the individual characteristics behind them.

·        Which helpful characteristics received your highest scores? How will you continue using them? BOX FOR NOTES

·        Which helpful characteristics received your lowest scores? Which of these would make the greatest difference if you developed them? BOX FOR NOTES

·        Which unhelpful characteristics received your highest scores? Which are most likely to interfere with your transformation? BOX FOR NOTES

·        Can you see connections between the two approaches? Could strengthening a helpful characteristic help you reduce an unhelpful one? BOX FOR NOTES

·        What are the characteristics that most need your attention? BOX FOR NOTES

·        What specifically will you do about them? BOX FOR NOTES

Your scores aren't the destination of this activity. They show how you are currently making the journey. BOX FOR NOTES

The purpose is to leave with a clearer understanding of what within your approach needs to be maintained, developed or changed to give your retirement transformation the best chance of succeeding.