A fulfilling life comes from habits that lead you towards joy and happiness. A life full of joy and happiness is the goal that every retiree strives to look back on, but… how do we get there? The concept seems so simple, but the actions to get there are often disguised. It requires conscious decision making and reflection to get yourself to where you want to be. We’ll go over a few things you can do to works towards a fulfilled retirement life.
Things you can do to live a fulfilled life
A fulfilled person has the power to create positive experiences for themselves, and takes advantage of this know-how time and time again throughout their daily routines. So all it takes to feel fulfilled is to be joyful! If only it were that easy… So what are some things that you can do now to create positive experiences for yourself and feel fulfilled?
Learn to laugh at yourself
Learning to laugh at yourself is an important skill to attain. Laughing at yourself sets you on an important path to inner peace and self-confidence. If you are able to truly laugh at yourself and the mistakes you make, you’re well on your way to self-acceptance which is important for achieving a fulfilled life. If you’re not able to accept who you are and where you are, you’ll never be satisfied with yourself and will never feel the fulfillment that you deserve. Life doesn’t need to be so serious, learn to laugh a little, even at yourself.
Appreciate the little things
Focusing and appreciating the smaller things in life brings your attention to what sustains you and allows you to live in this life. Being grateful, practicing gratitude and not taking thigs for granted allow you to feel fulfilled, happy and at peace with life. You’ll learn to realize that life isn’t always about you. There are so many other things going on around you that you forget about with the stresses of everyday life. These little things allow you to be where you are and have got you this far. Taking time to appreciate and be thankful for the little things allow you to be happier with how far you’ve come and how far you’ll go.
Find your passion
Participating in what you love and what you are passionate about may be the single biggest step to feeling fulfilled. Partaking in your passion gives you the desire, drive and reason to build new experiences and even relationships and bonds with other people. You’ll never regret revolving your life around what you love, even if you don’t start doing it until you’re retired! It’s never too late to find your passion. If you haven’t found your passion yet, that’s okay! Searching the depths of your mind and your past won’t always help you find it, you’ll easily get caught up in the search. Passion stems from experiences, not contemplation. So if you’re feeling stuck, create positive experiences and simply live your life, you’ll find it along the way.
Take risks
Taking risks in your life, no matter the outcome, allows you to grow and gain confidence, experience and resilience. These are all important to building a fulfilled life. Risks lead to enormous inner growth and admit the ability to look back and reflect and feel proud of the risks you took. Risks give you the opportunity to be more open and accepting of new things, it opens up so many doors in your life and provides opportunities for new experiences. Through risk taking, you learn to be content with your decisions, because often, you can’t take your actions back and simply have to move forward. So you might as well learn to be optimistic about what paths risks can lead you in your future. As people near the later years in their life, they often regret not taking risks, so in order to avoid regret and replace that with fulfillment, learn to take some risks.
Share your knowledge and wisdom
This is another big step you can take to feel fulfilled. Many people feel that the experiences they have throughout their lives gives them permission to have all the knowledge they have acquired and therefore don’t want to share it because they put in the work to get it. Although this is a true statement, sharing your knowledge and wisdom leads you to fulfillment. It gives you, and those you share it with, joy and opportunity. Maybe those you share your knowledge with take action and create something special, maybe it just makes someone smile. Whatever the outcome of sharing your wisdom and knowledge have, it’s better than keeping it all for yourself.
Take time to reinvent yourself
It’s extremely common for people to feel as though their careers make them who they are. When someone asks you to tell them about yourself, it’s likely that you would start by stating what you do or did for a living. Ex: “I’m a retired lawyer, I’ve practiced law for over 25 years”. Your career doesn’t have to define you, and it’s common for retirees to feel lost without their career because they don’t seem to know who they are anymore. So take some time to reinvent yourself, learn to describe yourself without the work you’ve done and focus instead on who you really are and what make you, you! This will help you feel fulfilled rather than lost and will encourage you to continue improving yourself.
Set goals
Setting goals are very important, once you are retired this is still relevant just in a different point of view. Setting goals allow you to live a fulfilled life in the sense that you are continually working towards an objective. If you focus these goals on self-improvement, you can feel fulfilled as you attain each of the goals you set out to achieve. This allows you to continually be successful as you lead a richer life, gaining knowledge, wisdom and experiences.
Take-away point
There are a number of things you can work on to acquire a fulfilled retirement life. Fulfillment is created through positive experiences. Following the above tasks can allow you to form healthy habits leading to a joyous, fulfilled retirement life that you can non-regretfully look back on as you continue to grow.