I awoke at 5am and according to my family it was about this time 73 years ago today that I was born! Lucky me! Oops, almost forgot, birthday or not still got to go to work. As I hit the garage door button to leave, I gazed out my driveway and couldn’t believe my eyes! My 30 year old pickup truck, Ol’ Whitey had had its passenger door glass shattered. As I approached the truck my greatest fears were realized.
As I looked inside, sure enough, it had been broken into, someone had rifled through the console probably looking for money! You see I am notorious for jumping in my truck to go solve some problem related to me being a landlord and leaving my wallet at home. So I keep a little money in Ol’ Whitey in case I find myself in that circumstance and am about to run out of gas.
Interestingly, they could have taken my bible or my tools, either of which would have benefitted them more in the long run but instead they had settled for some cash and had then dashed away into the very early, rainy morning darkness.
Key Areas of Retirement
This episode was supposed to be about the 5 key areas of living Your Best Retirement with Financial being one of the areas but with the surprise that it is not the most important area but rather it’s the least important. The rest of the podcast was supposed to then be dedicated to the evidence that your Values, Beliefs and Priorities/ Principles come first and how they drive where the money goes etc. etc.
And yet as I stood in my driveway with shattered glass around my feet, I realized what a great example here of how our values shape our lives (albeit at my expense) and how important it is to not only know them but to live them in order to maximize our health, our wealth and living our best retirement.
Values and Beliefs
Our Values and beliefs take up most of the internal dimension of a bigger space known as the Spiritual area, the first key area we have to figure out in retirement. The other dimension, external spirituality also influences the next two key areas of retirement known as the mental and social areas of retirement.
The fourth area is called the Physical aspect of retirement and since this area has the broadest range and degrees of conditions, this one is going to take a couple of episodes all on its own, so we going to park that out here on the lot for the moment.
Challenge Question
In the Challenge Tracker below you will find a list of over 140 common personal values. We want you to pick 5-10 that are near and dear to your heart. As an example mine include Faith/Contentment, Health/Strength, Goal/Results Orientation, Perseverance/Discipline and Reliability/Trustworthiness. I combined some of them because they were quite similar. Before selecting one ask yourself, “would those who know me most intimately, agree they see me actualize this value almost everyday?”
For extra credit try to prioritize them if you can.
In our workshop this fall we are going to help you intentionally incorporate these as you live Your Best Retirement life. This is one of the reasons we’ve adopted the slogan: Your Best Retirement, “Winning the 4th quarter on Purpose”
From your desktop or laptop, click the button below to get the Challenge Tracker. Save the file, or print it.
I’m reminded of a famous quote by none other than Walt Disney who said: “ When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.”
Now back to me standing in my driveway in the early morning rain. As best I can tell, they got away with about $40 in cash and left me with a $200 passenger window repair. As I reflected upon this event I wanted to know:
What does the Scripture say?
It can be found in John 10:10 “The thief comes only to kill, steal and destroy but I have come that YOU may have life, and have it more abundantly.”
That was the blessing that came out of this troubling event. Isn’t it inspirational to know we have that promise, that reward, right here, right now!
That’s it for this week, be sure to open your e-mail again next week where you’ll get the next piece of living Your Best Retirement. In the meantime, find somebody to share this episode with. I’m Coach Ledford, see you there.
Broken Glass For My Birthday