Retirement regrets? I have a few but then again… After the strange experience of visiting ‘that London’ for the first time in over two years, another strange experience this same week. The clue is in the above image. In case you don’t recognise it (and why would you?), it’s the last piece of work I published from when I still had a job. A file of training materials for schools who were working on improving pupil behaviour. I regarded it as a sort of greatest hits album in that there was a combination of ‘old’ stuff and new releases.
This week I spent some time looking through it for the first time in at least 8 years. In other words I haven’t picked it up since I retired. And after all this time I would have to say it’s not too shabby. In fact I think it’s excellent. Although whether it would be regarded as such by schools today I really couldn’t say.
I suppose the main question is, would I want it to be? Do I want to be popular? Or, to put it another way, have I finally left my career and its aspirations behind after these last eight years? I must admit reading through some of it (it’s bloody long) after all these years, I have to say I think, as well as being bloody long, it’s bloody good but once again, that’s not the point although I would have to say I’m surprised (and slightly disappointed) it didn’t sell better than it apparently did. So there is a small regret right there.
The point is, I think, if it could be successful now, would I want it to be or is all that career malarkey (is that how you spell it?) behind me for once and for all? All I can say at this point is that if it isn’t it bloody well should be.
But the question you will be asking yourselves – possibly – is why is he going on about this now? Why did he go up to the attic and dig out his remaining copy of the above and start reading it? Well, the answer lies with my son-in-law. He starts a new job in February. Simply put he’s moving from working for a physical / medical, on-line service to a psychological / mental health one.
In my humble opinion, if on-line help is a ‘good thing’, then this is a good move, in that I think mental health is more effectively helped on-line than physical health. I think of my Parkinson’s on-line assessment. But then I’m biased.
Anyway there we were sitting in our favourite Indian restaurant in London when he told us about his new job and rather to my surprise I found myself interested in how this might work. Which led me, again rather to my surprise, to one of my favourite work-related topics, that of evaluation. Specifically, how will you know if your on-line support team is actually helping your clients?
I don’t know if things have changed but back in the day this was probably the most difficult question any service / organisation had to answer. Because it was hard, most often it simply didn’t happen. It’s not like writing a retirement blog when the SEO figures say your readership figures are going up / going down. Success or failure.
Back in the old days psychologists did not much care for evaluation, make of that what you will. Maybe it’s different now. Anyway I was interested in helping if I could and my mind went back to what I’d written about the topic eight plus years ago. Hence digging out my materials and hence reading them through today (Tuesday).
Whether they contain anything relevant to this particular topic, i.e evaluation of an on-line counselling service is yet to be decided. I’m just saying at this point it’s early days but I’m interested by my reaction to there being a small degree of interest albeit from within the family, to something that was very much a part of my career all those years ago.
Retirement regrets summary
Purely by a stroke of fate I am confronted with the question this week of, do I have regrets looking back at my retirement? I think I’m being honest with myself when I say very few, maybe none at all. Do my fellow retirees feel the same way?