After working with terminally ill patients for years, Bonnie Ware often heard her patients express regrets as they reflected on their lives. So she wrote the popular book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.
Ware believes the book resonates with people as a reminder that we “only have a limited time to live the life we choose ourselves.” She believes it “gives people permission to change direction. That’s what it triggers—it’s a wakeup call and gives them permission to change tack.”
We need to know that someday, maybe sooner than later, we’re going to die, and we have to be OK with that. When we’re aware of our impending death without fearing it, we become paradoxically freer to live.
Retirement is its own form of death and I know from personal experience. After 30 years of a career of college teaching, I left to start an encore career. My focus now is helping people and organizations navigate transitions as a leadership and change management consultant. At the time I left teaching, I had spent more than half of my life in that institution. My colleagues were my family. My life as I knew it was ending and it was an emotional time of life. Yet, I don’t regret making the change. It is just part of the process of making a life transition.
Without preparation, retirement can be a time of living life by default and drift as if we are rudderless. If we think about our legacy on a daily basis (a concept I call Breadcrumb Legacy™) we might not have as many regrets. According to Ware, the top five regrets of the dying are:
- “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
- “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
- “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
- “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
- “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
While people often think of legacy at the end of life, they also think of it at the end of a career because it tends to be a defining moment. One part of life is ending and now a new phase of life is beginning.
A few months ago, I wrote an article for Forbes titled “How to Turn Your Retirement into Your Legacy. Then I read this article about Tom Jones, the music legend of the 1960s and Las Vegas performer. He is thinking about his legacy and he never used to, he says. But now that he is over 80, he is giving time and thought to how he will be remembered.
According to the article, Jones said, “You don’t realize what’s happened to you over the years, what image gets formed. Then suddenly, I’m thinking my God, what have I become? … When I’d see someone doing an impression of me, I’d think, Jesus, I mean – is that it? … So you do think about these things as you get older. You don’t want to leave this world just with that.”
Jones concluded that he wasn’t all that happy with his legacy. He understands that time is getting shorter and he wants to do work now that is important which is his new purpose. He is determined to change it while he still has time. “You have to realize, how long do I have? … You can’t push it away. I’m not going to live forever.” Jones continued, “I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve done recording-wise in the past … But time is getting shorter. I want to keep doing important things. And that’s for my legacy.”
The bottom line is it is never too late to leave a legacy. And like Tom Jones, we can change our legacy if we are not happy with our current legacy. Actually, we are living and leaving our legacy daily –in bite size pieces—breadcrumbs. It is also not too late to prevent the five regrets of the dying. Have the courage to be true to yourself and to express your feeling. Reach out and reconnect with your friends or initiate new friendships. Choose to be happy. Retirement gives us more time to intentionally think about how we are living our lives and how we want to be remembered.
Read the full article here
