The Inspired Retirement
Purpose and Passion in Your Next Adventure
The Inspired Retirement is a holistic self-help guide that recommends creative and fulfilling ways for making each postcareer day meaningful, joyful, and productive.
Professor Nathalie Martin’s mindful self-help guide Inspired Retirement is about making the postcareer chapters of life both delightful and sustainable.
Herein, inspired retirement is about creating happiness and taking care of all the issues that get in its way. In chapters dense with research and anecdotes gleaned from a multitude of interviews, the book asserts that a conscious optimization of life’s final decades on every level is a worthy endeavor. Financial security is sidelined as one of the least important considerations, allowing a focus on the qualities of mind, body and spirit to take center stage. Finding creative and fulfilling ways to use one’s lifetime of wisdom, skills, and networks to make each twenty-four-hour increment meaningful, joyful, and productive is a central theme.
The transition from work to retirement is packed with opportunities for personal growth, the book asserts. Such opportunities are explored in depth, with exercises, meditations, and journal prompts at the end of most chapters. Mending relationships, working through past traumas, eliminating negative thought patterns, reducing stress, dealing with workaholic tendencies, and other obstacles to a stellar retirement are confronted with compassion and a multitude of holistic and conventional healing modalities. In the chapter on dealing with difficult emotions, for example, the book asserts:
There is no joy without sadness, no success without challenge, no inner peace without struggle. If we want to live fully and experience real happiness, we have no choice but to experience the full range of human emotions.
A number of other retirement-themed self-help books are referenced to reinforce the assertion that most people focus on whether they’ll have enough money for retirement rather than the intrinsic aspects of life postcareer. This key point is expanded on in every chapter with salient research, insights, interviewee testimonials, and passionate anecdotes from or about a wide and diverse group of people nearing or already in retirement. In addition to Martin’s tales about her and her husband’s lives as they contemplated transitioning into retirement come entertaining and insightful stories from academics, lawyers, creatives, and other professionals about reinventing themselves after retiring. From becoming a full-time volunteer to starting a nonprofit, and from becoming an educator to pivoting because of health or other challenges, the contributors are approachable and authentic. Middle- and lower-income individuals are underrepresented in these stories, though.
An encompassing retirement primer, The Inspired Retirement is about creating a meaningful and joyful life.
Reviewed by
Patty Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
