Women and Retirement: You’re Achievement Inventory

In the last blog post, we talked about making a complete list of all of the achievements of your life and putting it on paper. Hopefully you have done that and taken the time to relax and enjoy all that you have accomplished. Did you ever stop to think how much you have achieved? It feels good, right?
Now, let’s talk about how you can use this list when thinking about your transition into the new phase of your life called retirement. The first way is to simply remember how great you felt when you achieved any one of the items on the list. You felt great, you felt important, heck, you may have even felt like the proverbial greatest thing since sliced bread. When looking forward, you can use that feeling to project what you would like to achieve now. Remember, if you can achieve something once, you can replicate that success over and over. What got you to that particular achievement? Make a list of how you got to any of those achievements and compare it to what you want to do now. Can you do basically the same thing to achieve greatness again? No sense in reinventing the wheel since you has already been successful. Simply build on the success that you have already achieved to do it again.
Another way to use the list is to augment your resume or curriculum vitae. If you want to continue in the same career field, it is important to list achievements if they pertain to the job that you are interested in at the time. It’s easy to overlook an important achievement, particularly when you have a lot of them. You never know what an employer is looking for so be sure to include those that relate to the job that you are interested in.
A final way that you can use you achievement list is to identify new opportunities. Perhaps you stretched your skills by doing a particular task that you had never done like doing a presentation before a professional group to which you belong. You have never been a confident public speaker so you write you speech, practice, and you are a huge hit at the conference. Hmmm, you decide that you enjoy public speaking after all and want to do more but life interferes and you get mired in the everyday junk that we all deal with at times. When you take the time to carefully review the skills inventory, you can tease out the pieces and parts of achievements that you haven’t fully explored.
So, you have a tremendous list of achievements and you should be proud. Take that great list and use it to produce new successes – whatever they may be now. This is your time and you define and achieve new successes and then you can add them to your list. Doesn’t it feel good?